Including music and the temporal arts in language documentation

Abstract

This chapter is intended for linguistic researchers preparing to undertake fieldwork, probably documenting one of the world’s many small or endangered languages. Recognising that linguists have their own priorities and methodologies in language documentation and description, I will advance reasons for including in your corpus the song and/or instrumental music that you are almost certain to encounter in the course of your fieldwork. I start by providing an overview of current thinking about the nature and significance of human musical capacities and the commonly encountered types, context and significance of music, especially in relation to language. Since research funding usually precludes having a musicologist tag along in the original fieldwork, I will suggest some topics for discussion that would be of interest to musicologists, and make some suggestions for what is needed on a practical level to make your recordings useful to musicologists at a later date. I comment on the technical and practical requirements for a good musical documentation and how these might differ from language documentation, and also provide some suggestions on a workflow for field production of musical recordings for community use. Examples taken from my own fieldwork are intended to provide food for thought, and not to imply that music and dance traditions in other societies are necessarily structured in comparable ways.